Thursday, January 15, 2009

Going to HeadStart in Bangalore with EnTrip

HeadStart.in is an annual conference that showcases Indian Startup Innovations, and brings together the all the stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem in India - EnTrepreneurs and startups, researchers from industry and academia, early adopters of new products as well as investors.

Out of nowhere, we received an inivtation to demo and showcase our product, and be part of HeadStart 2009. Awsome! I was unfamiliar with the HeadStart conference format, and soon learned that it was akin to an Indian model of TechCrunch50 - but at a different level, of course, and not focusing on web, but technology startups in general.

In a last-minute renegade style fashion, we (Akshay, Anthony, Shardul and Subh) produced banners, presentations and handouts on monday, hopped on a train from Pune to Bangalore, and had a great Conference-TeamBuilding-Road-Trip to Bangalore.

What we've been focusing on in the last few weeks and months was to build (and 'launch') our first product: a Map-Based TravelBlog. EnTrip as a concept has finally received it's first incarnation as one tangible product. Now, for the first time, we would be demonstrating it in person to a large (mostly tech) audience at HeadStart, and subject ourselves to public and personal scrutiny.

We used this opportunity to yet again use EnTrip ourselves, and have blogged about our experiences on EnTrip itself on our trip EnTrip at HeadStart. Please get the full story there.

In a nutshell, it was a great experience:

It was a areat opportunity for team building

It was great to get some direct user and techie feedback, in person

We could finally showcase to people, in person, some of what we've been working on in the last few months - something most software/web developers don't ever get to do in their respective (large) companies